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Each summer the Met offers a free outdoor performance, and the one-night-only event is going down in Prospect Park later this evening. Two of the opera world's biggest stars, Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, will be belting out duets as Ion Marin conducts the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Fun fact: Gheorghiu and Alagna were married backstage at the Met during a run of La Bohème in 1996...by Giuliani!
Head over to the park (there's a map after the jump) for the evening of open air arias (the weather is good for it) -- the performance is at 8 p.m. Read up on the preparation that went into the event at the NY Times, who also add that The Met chorus will be donning costumes designed by Isaac Mizrahi.
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Roll a phat spliff and pass it around.
"Among the numbers on the program are duets from Bizet’s 'Pêcheurs de Perles,' Delibes’s 'Lakme' and Donizetti’s 'Lucia di Lammermoor,' as well as arias from Catalani’s 'Wally' and Puccini’s 'Tosca' and 'Madama Butterfly.'"
Why aren't they doing a Manhattan performance this year? The Met usually does 2 Central Park performances each summer, and I am so bummed they aren't this year.
Read the Times article. Met Director Peter Gelb has taken a different approach to this summer's concert, choosing to bring high-profile stars to the concert, doing a single performance in what he considers the city's geographic center. It was a fabulous performance: weather was perfect, the stars were charismatic and chose a combination of interesting material and traditional crowd pleasers.
Several high-def video screens were set up along with speaker towers. I think they anticipated 100,000+ people. I'd guess there were more like 25,000, but the show was excellent.